“What are you thinking about?” Richard nudged her.
She turned them around. “My brother and sister.”
“Those kids,” Richard joked.
There was so little kidlike about them. Martha at forty-four had six squawking children and Martin drank so much that his personality was beginning to change. They hadn’t played sports like she had, although Martin had tried; he’d just never been good. She used to wrestle him on the kitchen linoleum, and even when he finally got bigger he couldn’t beat her. Martha had the back room, over the garage. Her bathroom smelled of Avon. Elizabeth was the athlete, she was the health nut, she was the exerciser. Stop it, she muttered. Stop it.
They were nearing home. Richard gave up her hand so he could unlock the door. She punched in the code on the burglar alarm. He tiptoed up to the meditation room. The house, with all its leather and tile and marble and chrome, its recessed pin lighting against the London gray and cold, and its feng shui fabrics, ticked on.
In the kitchen—forty thousand pounds to renovate—she pulled out the day’s third bag of vits and popped them three or four at a time—some stone colored, some orange-translucent, some capsules, some tablets, some round, one nearly square—until she’d done all fifty. Her blood work, Sparks said, was extraordinary. It’s just that the spots didn’t go away. One hundred and fifty pills a day and hormones and tinctures and herbs and teas, and still she had all those tumors. Why couldn’t she just blast them out of her system? “A real accomplishment,” Martin had tried to exult on the phone after yesterday’s results. “If I could have prayed for anything nine months ago,” Richard reminded her last night, “it would be for it to be the same.” It was. She wasn’t.
Everybody had to die. If she could have twenty more years, then it would be okay. Maybe even ten. She was eleven months past diagnosis.
Get out of your head, she thought. Just get out of your head. Get out now.
At least there was God. At least God was everywhere. At least when you opened your eyes every morning, there was the burnished dresser and the mango-colored window dressing and Richard pressing his glasses on and peering at you in that cryptic, warm way of his, as if to say, I know you, don’t I, and I love you—yes, that’s right. He could go into that narrow room with the two-thousand-quid Turkish carpet and the incense and the picture of Muyamaya, and he could will himself into an absolute clarity and purity. He’d said, when they’d first met, You mean, you don’t mind? Of course not, she’d said. And from there on she’d joined his yoga group, traveling to retreats in California and in upstate New York and—when they moved to London—in Bridgetown. So much stillness you knew yourself. A different way to be inside your head. Not this American panic.
She listened for him. It had been only ten minutes. Sometimes she grew so impatient to have him back that she was tempted to set the microwave timer, but she couldn’t bear to watch the time tick down anymore. And if she couldn’t freeze it, then she’d expand it, she’d take the moment between each heartbeat and get inside of it and swell its engorged walls and make it tell her and show her everything she needed to know and see, and make it let her touch everything she needed to feel—to know it, to occupy it, to make it yours. Never to let it go because then it couldn’t let you go. All this—as Martin would say—New Age shit, but without sounding terrible. Like he said all this work shit or all this love shit or all this family shit or all this medical shit.
She lay on the sofa under the new pain, feeling the terror, laid out under nothing. Passing. Passed. The pain was a tear along the brittle handle of her pelvis. The pain was a crack in the plate. If only the pain was all in her head. The way the bone scan would expose it. Elizabeth, Sparks would say, Elizabeth, we’re sorry but it’s spread to the pelvis. Sometimes she wished she’d never known, sometimes she wished she could always know, have scans once a day to help her track it, let her see that what she did was working. She needed to believe that she could know by the way she did what she was doing, but it was hard. It was hard not to feel it spreading, moving on to parts she hadn’t even needed to be aware that she had, devouring her as it made room for itself. Why couldn’t she believe?
“Sweetie?”
It was Richard, his face red, standing in the doorway.
“What?”
“What is it? You called,” he stammered. “You called out.”
“I did?” Now she was blushing, feeling inside to see if there was an answer.
“Oh yes.” He stared at her. “You okay?”
“Sure,” she said. “Sure.”
He stood over her. “You’re practically out of breath.”
“Well.” So it still hurt. Not a big deal. Just a little pain. Oh sure.
He sat beside her on the sofa. “You know the door’s thick up there. I guess you must have screamed. Been screaming. Whatever.”
“Okay,” she said. “I mean,” and she heard herself panting, “I’m okay.”
“Do you want anything?”
“No,” she said fiercely.
He touched the neckline of her blouse, held her hand. “You’re soaked anyway. Maybe a bath with some salts.”
“Yeah.” You could lose what little hold you had on yourself so easily; its strength was less than tissue or thread. It was nothing. “Okay. I could do that.”
“You want some help?”
“No.” She swallowed to make sure she could say all the words. “You go finish. I’ll be fine.”
He stood, waiting.
“Go on,” she said.
He looked at her sheepishly. “All right, then.”
She shut her eyes to the sound of him padding up the stairs, clicking the thick door shut in the tiny room. He’d face the near wall, the one with the photograph, bend to his knees, descend to the carpet, glance once at the picture, bow his head, and rebegin. It’s good that you already meditate, Sparks had told her. It will help. But that was after she’d said that nothing could cure her. It would help in the not helping. Sometimes she’d get on the tube and she’d look at all those people, the artsy university students and the schlubby civil servants and the buttoned-up corporate aggressors (one of whom she used to be) and think, we’re all going to die. What did it matter? All of us. Soon. Sooner than probably anybody admits. In a transfer of records between one clinic and another, Sparks’s notes fell into her hands. Elizabeth makes it quite clear she doesn’t want to talk about prognosis. She’d shrieked when she read that. That was not it at all. She’d heard the prognosis once, and now and forever after she’d have to get past it and not rely on it, because then it was down to choosing which shoes to be buried in, how much money to parcel off for her nieces’ and nephews’ college. You need to get your affairs in order. If only you could keep it all in chaos, then maybe you weren’t allowed to die. Once Richard had come home unexpectedly and caught her wallowing in the pages of her will, and he’d quickly, forcefully, silently shook his head, as if to say, Don’t give up. You can’t give up.
“We can do hormones,” Sparks had told her the very first meeting, ticking off each item with her long, sleek fingers. “We can do drugs. We can take alternative measures. But at the end of the day”—she shook her head—“there’s not much we can really do.”
“Well, all that is something,” Elizabeth had said.
“Yes, it’s something,” Sparks forced herself to agree.
“I am positive,” Elizabeth said.
“Good.” Sparks nodded. “That’s good.”
The student in Lauren’s office wanted to register for a course that was long filled. Lauren dutifully tapped out an e-mail on his behalf, sent it, and sat staring at the screen, waiting to see if the return would be instant. The end-of-registration add/drop window slowly closed itself over the cables and in the corridors. They had twenty minutes left.
“I really need to get into this course,” the advisee said, his face red and puffed. “It’s why I came here.”
It was David Lazlo’s multimedia freshman seminar
on the Civil War. Slide shows, films, radio plays, transcripts, diaries. It had been filled since June. It was forever filled.
“How much longer?” he whined. “My parents are waiting for me in my room.”
Lauren swiveled toward him as he sat beside her. His parents were still here, but all parents had been dismissed at the end of the convocation two days before. “Look, Tristan,” she said, recognizing the panic in his eyes. “You’re not going to get in. There’s a wait list twenty students long, and I think you need to move on with this.”
“I want a freshman seminar,” Tristan said, his face crumbling. “I need a freshman seminar.”
She touched his elbow lightly. “It’s not going to happen.”
“Couldn’t you call him?”
Though she considered Lazlo an ally of the junior faculty, he was the chair of the History Department and could be a bit regal. She picked up the phone and dialed.
“Professor Lazlo’s office.”
“Hi, Mary, it’s Lauren. I’ve got a student here who really needs to get into David’s freshman seminar.”
“Lauren.” Mary sighed. “I’m so sorry.”
Lauren swiveled away from Tristan and dropped her voice. “His parents are still here.”
“Sounds like he’s one foot out the door already,” Mary concurred. “I’ll put you through.”
Lauren glanced briefly at Tristan. His eyes were glistening. If he didn’t get a fifth course, then she was really going to lose him. What would the dean of retention say?
“Is that Lauren?” David said thickly into the phone. “Lauren, my good friend. So good of you to call. I never hear from you often enough.”
“Hey, David.” He always laid on the irony. At least he was married to a genuine person; she had no idea how Cindy lived with him. “I’ve got a student here.”
“A student? Imagine!”
“Yes, yes. And he’d love to be in your freshman seminar.”
“Hah! Even the provost’s daughter can’t get into that course. Tell him to take the year off and try again.”
“David?”
“Lauren, my child, if I give in to you, then all my other acolytes will—”
“Thanks a lot, David.” She hung up.
“Tristan,” she said, almost gaily.
He just looked at her.
Cognitive dissonance, she thought. Cognitive dissonance. “That Civil War stuff,” she said, “is old history. It’s recycled news. It’s past yesterday. Is that what you want to devote your misery to?” She realized she’d been sitting inside too long, and on such a nice day. “Let’s talk about something living, something breathing, something right now. Something that still matters. Biology. Management. Spanish. Whaddya say?”
“You’re funny,” Tristan sniffled. “But I want that course, I came here for that course, and if I’m not going to get that course”—he rose from his chair and smiled at her, smiled as if he’d known this was coming from the moment he signed his enrollment letter in the spring—“then I’m probably out of here.”
Probably. That was something to latch on to.
“Film and the Vietnam War?” she tried, even though she knew it was full.
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. He pouted just like Max. She could have hugged him.
“Absolutely uh-uh?”
“Thanks for seeing me, Professor Kelly.” He shook her hand, just like an adult.
“Don’t forget our last orientation dinner tonight,” she said gamely.
He smiled and shook his head again. Now he was an adult. Now he had made up his mind.
As he left, she called, “Tell your parents I said hello.”
She sagged back in her chair, eyeing the door. Thirteen minutes to go. Maybe no one else was coming. Maybe she was done. It was hard to believe classes would begin tomorrow. It was hard to believe that in front of her stretched the whole appalling semester, the syllabi to distribute, the lectures to deliver, the discussions to pry from her students, the papers to assign and collect and grade and return, the department and committee meetings to attend, her own work to write, the trips to London to squeeze in. What little time—was it really only months now?—she and Martin had been told they had left with Elizabeth draining from them. The students indifferent, besieged, hostile, often medicated. Paxil or Prozac or Ritalin, she couldn’t keep track. At a dinner party she’d once cornered a colleague from Residential Affairs and demanded to know how many students were on a prescription, their personalities sandblasted into blandness. “A lot,” the colleague said, studying the label of his beer bottle. “But in percentages?” Lauren insisted. He shrugged. “Thirty?” Lauren guessed. The colleague began peeling back the label. “Forty?” The label curled slowly from the bottle. “Fifty?” He gave a slight but definitive nod and crumpled the label in his hand. Maybe it was better that Tristan left.
“Professor Kelly?” A student stood in the door. “Lauren?”
She squinted. She knew she needed glasses, but the ophthalmologist insisted she just needed to squint. She wondered if there was any more migraine medication in her briefcase.
“Come in,” she said. “Sit down.”
It was Jane Doyle, a sophomore, a departmental major, and Martin’s advisee. She wore black lingerie and too-tight jeans.
“I’m dressing like my roommate,” she explained.
“Oh.” Lauren nodded.
“I was wondering if you’d talk to me about transferring.”
“Transferring?” Lauren tapped the pen against her cheek.
Jane stared at her, rubbed her hands against each other. “It’s really kind of awful here, you know.”
Out Lauren’s window the late summer sun was slowly tingeing the tall sugar maples rising from the quad. Where to begin, where to begin. It was only registration, for god’s sake. She knew it was awful, but depending on your reasons any place could be awful. “How so?” she asked.
Jane gave a mock dramatic sigh. “You know.”
She smiled wanly. “Tell me about it.”
“The whole wretched J. Crew-Gap undergraduate culture, of course. The lazy, platitudinous professors. The shrinks over in Psychiatric Services who keep wanting to put me on medication. And, good god, there are just so many dead people here.”
“I’m not even going to ask you what that’s supposed to mean.” Lauren pulled a folder from her desk drawer. “What about a year abroad?”
Jane glared at her. “I don’t want to go to England. I don’t want to go to Germany. I want to go to someplace anthropological, for god’s sake.” She took a breath. “I know, I know, humanity is everywhere.” She was mimicking Martin’s line, and they both smirked. “But sometimes it’s more human other places.”
“The Gap,” Lauren pointed out, “is everywhere.”
Now Jane looked out the window. “I probably couldn’t get the same amount of aid anywhere else anyway.”
“How do you know that?”
The student sneered. “So you want me to leave?”
They laughed. Martin and Lauren had coddled her all last year. But if she wanted to transfer, they had to help. Jane thumbed the strap of her top. Her pale face reddened.
“I am so bored, and I just got back,” she said sadly.
“Everybody’s on the brink.” Lauren kept her voice smooth, touched the girl’s wrist. “Sometimes the beginning can make you feel like that. That it’s really a kind of cliff.” She could strangle herself for this psychobabble. Atop the building the bell clock tolled; tiny reverberations rumbled from the floor. “We’ll help you get a list together,” she promised. “We’ll help.”
Jane rose, her face—Lauren saw with relief—composed. “I know,” she said. “I guess you’d better be going. Tell Martin I’m still here.”
“I will.”
She strode from the room, her back stiffening in the inordinately revealing attire.
Since the Kappa Theta infanticide last year, Lauren felt that she ought to call Psychiatric Services at any
hint of crisis, but, good grief, then they’d parachute in with all their medications and another personality would be dosed into remission. Sometimes all Lauren could see was that face, and sometimes she couldn’t summon it at all, couldn’t hear the voice. And she’d feel a panic and confusion rise within her. Was Cara short, was her voice bubbly? No one had even known she was pregnant. All those classes she sat through without uttering a word, all those empty smiles, all those careless nods of recognition and understanding, then that one Friday of chatterboxing, when she talked and talked in class, and afterward Lauren had said quietly, “Cara, are you all right.” “Oh, sure,” she’d said, “I’m great.” Saturday night she’d dumped her newborn into a trash can at the Yankee Motel. I’m great. It wasn’t, I’m not well. It wasn’t, Help me. It was, I’m great. Great. She was great. She was serving three to five. Four weeks into their first semester, their house still in boxes, Max breast-feeding, Sarah a first grader, Elizabeth undiagnosed (a bad back, the doctors in London were thinking), the trees just turning. The student was a cheerful girl, she had a family, she doodled in class, she wrote gossipy columns for the newspaper, she had a roommate, she belonged to a sorority. She killed her own baby. Almost no one knew what to make of it. The president, a Canadian who insisted he was from Boston, had declared the matter private. The provost had counseled to keep in close contact with the students, to have a sense of them, to watch for danger signs. Campus Security had asked after anything unusual, and Lauren had confessed how Cara had talked and talked in class that day and that she had been wearing mirrored sunglasses until she’d been asked to take them off. Did they tape-record that conversation? Martin wanted to know, not in a paranoid way, just out of curiosity, just for the sake of speculation. She couldn’t remember. The baby’s death the newspapers called involuntary manslaughter, a turn of language that at first glance could make it sound as if the student had allowed her child to choke on a piece of food.
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